Why We're Ready for a Movie About a Violent Fight Club for Women

In the new movie Raze, women fight to the death. The film is sort of a female Fight Club: Women, known only by their first names, are abducted and forced to battle each other one-on-one in a dank, concrete bunker arena. But unlike Fight Club, where the men are choosing to fight as a way to push back against a society they feel has emasculated them, the women in Raze are the pawns of an insane and wealthy couple that uses the fights as a demented kind of entertainment. The women—save one total psycho character who loves every minute—are not fighting because they want to. If they don't fight, their families will be killed.

What results is an emotionally wrenching, completely brutal, and wonderfully riveting film (full disclosure here: my husband works for IFC Films, the company that's releasing the movie). Raze seems part of a larger film trend of kick-ass, powerful women who aren't just fighting to inspire male titillation, like the bikini-clad foxy boxing and Jell-O wrestling of yore.

There's the ubiquitous Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen and new YA queen Tris Prior of the Divergent series, the movie version of which will be released in March. In real life, the rise of female UFC stars like Ronda Rousey into mainstream popularity shows that we're in a moment where the culture is embracing female aggression and violence. But why?

Part of it is that women, by most measures, have become more aggressive and violent in general over the past few decades. As my former colleague Hanna Rosin points out in "The End of Men", according to FBI crime statistics, "the share of women arrested for violent crimes rose from 11 percent in 1990 to 18 percent in 2008." Furthermore, Rosin summarizes research that shows from the '70s to the '90s, women increasingly described themselves using traditionally masculine descriptors like "assertive" and "self-reliant." So we may just be seeing what's going on in real life finally mirrored in our popular culture.

If women are becoming more aggressive, then it follows that they might want action stars of their very own, so that they may live vicariously through them. Zoë Bell, the star of Raze, who is a stuntwoman as well as an actress, thinks that part of the appeal of the female violence in Raze and the movies of ex-mixed martial artist-turned-actress Gina Carano is that feels emotionally realistic.

The women in Raze have deep-seeded motivations for their violence—Bell's character, Sabrina, fights other women to the death not for jollies, but because sadistic overlords have threatened to kill her daughter if she does not. "It is a dude's job in a pride of lions to kill things so people can eat, and her job is to look after the cub—that doesn't mean not killing," Bell says. "For a woman to fight, it has to come in this primal way. There will be woman out there to want to fight because they want to win. But it's less likely."

The rash of violent women on the big screen might also stem from the fact that even though it's more acceptable for women to be violent than it used to be, it's still fairly taboo. Women are still far less violent than men are in real life, even if they are committing more violent crimes than they used to. So it feels fresh for women to be kicking the bejesus out of each other.

"If you had done a guy version of Raze, it wouldn't be as fun, or as horrifying to watch," Raze's fight coordinator James Young says. The cruel ringleaders forcing the women in Raze to fight even say they are staging these battles as explicit taboo-busters. The fighters, one of the bad guys says, are "the first truly empowered women, without the shackles of polite society."

I wouldn't go so far as to say that what goes on in Raze is empowered, and yet, as a viewer, watching Raze was invigorating. The experience left me with a quickened pulse and a feeling of excitement. It didn't make me want to gouge another woman's eyes out with my bare hands—something that happens in the movie—but it did satiate a kind of visceral aggression that I didn't even know I had. Maybe some day I'll be as inured to woman-on-woman violence as I am to man-on-man. But for now, you'll find me down an Internet rabbit hole trying to find Ronda Rousey clips.